Fawn McKay Brodie: Inquirer into the Morality of Men

In Fawn McKay Brodie’s own words, it is an “‘exaggerated act of arrogance’” to write a biography, “‘especially’” a psychobiography that tries to explain the inner workings and motivations of an individual (Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, 1999, p. vii, hereafter Biography; all quotations from, except as noted). Condensing such an attempt into a brief review moves this into foolishness. This problem is compounded by a bias of admiration for this woman—who not only tolerated conflict, but charged into it—and who forced me to look at contradictory facts and helped me with them—an effect similar to psychotherapy.

Brodie spent her life exploring and explaining male sexuality and its associated immoral or conflicted behavior. She had a “preoccupation with truth and lying, and we [can] detect a pattern of love and envy, attraction and aversion, admiration for and bafflement about the public figures (all of them male, incidentally) she chose to write about.” Her works resulted in “honors and acrimony in about equal measure. She came to know more notoriety than anonymity, scorned in some quarters, celebrated in others” (William Mulder in Newell G. Bringhurst, ed., Reconsidering No Man Knows My History: Fawn M. Brodie and Joseph Smith in Retrospect, 1996, pp. vii, x, hereafter Reconsidering). In repeated cycles, Brodie was castigated and vilified, and then eventually vindicated.

Fawn McKay was born in 1915 into what

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appeared to be an idyllic setting, today frequently sought by those wanting to retire or seeking a second gracious home in a small town. The town was Huntsville, about 50 miles northeast of Salt Lake City and up a canyon subjected to three months of severe winter, although the other seasons each had their distinct beauty which at times reached glory. The home reflected their superior status, one of the two largest in the town with its rock and frame walls containing 14 rooms, and white picket fence in front.

Fawn descended from patrician Mormon stock that had converted in the 1850s and 1860s in Scotland or the Eastern United States and had become the elite of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her maternal grandfather became president of Brigham Young University, but more importantly, her uncle, David O. McKay, an educator and legislator, rose through Church services and mission presidencies to become a Mormon Apostle and eventually President of the Church. His tall, white-haired, and distinguished appearance, along with eloquence in speaking, revived, by common membership usage, the term “Prophet,” little used since the days of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church. His brother, Thomas E. McKay, Fawn’s father, also tall and distinguished in appearance, was an educator, businessman, farmer, commissioner for public utilities, state senator, and eventually one of the Assistants to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church.

Fawn grew up in a devout home in a town where all worshipped together, with religious meetings throughout the week in the nearby chapel, blessings before every meal, and family prayers on knees every evening before bed. All of the religion centered on the Prophet Joseph Smith who, a century earlier, had “restored” God’s only true Church to the earth by, he claimed, receiving God’s authority—the “priesthood”—from visitations from Jesus and angels, following 1600 years of faulty man-made religion. One of these angels directed Smith to buried ancient scripture from pre-Columbian America, written on gold plates, which Smith miraculously translated as the Book of Mormon. Published in 1830, it is considered sacred scripture and a companion to the Bible by Mormon Church members. Smith was, in the words of Fawn Brodie, “the first cause—the explanation for Mormon Country—the reason in fact for one being born at all. I cannot remember the first time I heard of his visions and his golden plates, and the shocking tale of his murder in Carthage jail. I seem always to have known him” (Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, 1945, jacket cover, second edition 1971, hereafter No Man).

Polygamy, a poorly guarded secret since God had commanded the Church in the practice through Joseph Smith in 1843, was publicly announced by Brigham Young in 1852, and had become the most notorious characteristic of the Mormons. The McKay men did not take plural wives but in the late 19^th century did help hide polygamists from the federal authorities in the “Mormon underground.” Fawn Brimhall, mother of Fawn McKay, grew up amidst the tensions of a polygamist family and home. Fawn Brimhall’s grandfather, George Washington Brimhall, took five wives and fathered 14 children. His oldest son, George H. Brimhall, ultimately president of Brigham Young University, married two women polygamously and fathered 15 children, including Fawn Brimhall by his second wife. Fawn Brimhall experienced the added difficulty of her mother’s hiding from federal authorities in the Mormon underground until the Church formally abandoned plural marriage.

Fawn Brodie’s mother met her future husband, Thomas E. McKay, while she was traveling in Europe and he was President of the Swiss-Austrian mission. She was 23 and he 36 when they married in the Salt Lake Temple in 1912 and, perhaps most importantly, the wife took an oath to obey her husband.

Fawn McKay, the second of five children, was born on September 15, 1915 into a family with unspoken seeds of tension that grew to sufficient size to create an author who would seek to solve mysteries and drive headlong into controversy her whole life. Fawn’s intelligence approached or reached the genius level. She was “outspoken, inherently inquisitive, always asking questions, always curious and always wanting to learn.” Fear of whooping cough led to home schooling by her mother who used advanced and encouraging techniques. Fawn was memorizing poetry by the age of three; by the age of six she was reading fourth grade books. She was rapidly promoted, showed competitiveness, and wept when she lost a spelling bee to a 12-year-old boy who was almost twice her age. She had hay fever that conveniently kept her inside with her love of books.

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Through them she had her first view of an alternate world outside of Huntsville. She had childhood beliefs in her religion; and, as expected, in the Sunday testimony meeting, spoke with absolute certainty about the truth of the Mormon doctrine of restored priesthood and Joseph Smith’s claims of receiving “truth” by revelations. Her first published poem in a Mormon children’s periodical was about the need to be immediately obedient to her mother.

The tensions in the family had begun before the marriage. Fawn’s father was the second of eight adult children, in a family of strict discipline, absolute unity, and rigid religious beliefs. To preserve family unity, Fawn’s grandparents had turned the farmhouse home into a legal corporation, owned by the McKay children, but with decisions determined by a “phalanx” of four sisters and governed by the determined oldest brother, David O. McKay, who had a Church position that emphasized his “inspired” actions and decisions. He was, said Fawn later, “like a Chinese Patriarch.” Fawn’s father, generous and soft-spoken, spent his life avoiding confrontation. His style of never raising his voice or showing anger, and of appeasement, may have served him well in business, politics, and the Church, but led to the ease with which his siblings served their own desires and resulted in Fawn growing up in a house which had never been, and would never be, their own home. Fawn’s mother, not a McKay by birth, had no say over the house. Her family of five children was relegated to two bedrooms out of the nine in the house. In summer, all the siblings’ families would come at any time and stay for weeks to enjoy their home, bedrooms, and environs. “I don’t know how my parents put up with it,” recalled Fawn’s sister.

Fawn commented that “It was always [father’s] way to run away from trouble rather than facing up to it,” and all family tensions were held in check by “the seemingly invincible discipline of Love.” All fled from any genuine argument and “worked with religious intensity at preserving an atmosphere of tranquility.” The farm had not been big enough when divided, and so it was taken over by Fawn’s father who took out a high mortgage on the farm, with which he paid off his three brothers. While the details are unclear, the four brothers borrowed money on the land, invested it in speculative commodities, and lost everything, with the main burden on Fawn’s father. This left the family in genteel poverty with the father bearing the relentless debt over 30 years “like Atlas, without hope and without lament.” They had to take in boarders, the father worked excessive hours, and the mother bought simple school dresses on credit, which on two occasions was refused.

As a result, the more affluent McKays looked down upon the Thomas E. McKays as not living up to the McKay image as family gentry. Yet no one helped install indoor plumbing and, in fierce winter, chamber pots were used, which froze and had to be thawed on the kitchen stove before being emptied in “Mrs. Grundy,” the outhouse, which was a public embarrassment whenever guests had to use the toilet. In contrast to this, Fawn had seen in Salt Lake City the comfortable, even wealthy, lives of her father’s siblings.

The tensions in the McKay family, partly hidden under a fraudulent façade of tranquility, were further exposed by the travails of Fawn’s mother. Years later, after her mother had made a third, successful, terrible suicide attempt by fire, Fawn wrote:

I still feel that much of her suffering was unnecessary, and that she could have had some pleasant years at the end, but she was caught in a Victorian society and trapped in the patriarchal traditions of the Mormon Church…. The worst thing, I think, was that there were so few to whom she could speak honestly, and so she turned her hatreds and furies inward, and this proved in the end to be a corrupting thing.

Fawn’s maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall, was a “nominally devout” Mormon living in a day of more thinking freedom than the Church allows today. He was a “free spirit” with a fine mind, and “independent in his attitudes.” It appears that, as the Church became more restrictive, these attributes forced him out of the presidency of the University. But there was some evidence of emotional instability, along with increasing painful physical disability, which increased until he “splattered” his brains by gunshot when Fawn was 16 years old. Such acts in fundamentalist churches are suspected to be the result of a lack of some degree of faith, or even viewed as a sin.

His second wife, who cared for the first wife’s six children as well as her own nine, must have felt overburdened and abandoned, with a physical body worn down by deliveries and hard work.

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We are told she disapproved of the doctrine of polygamy, an attitude that carried down to Fawn Brimhall. George H. Brimhall’s emotional instability may have also transferred down, for Fawn’s mother experienced repeated bouts of depression that contributed to her suicide.

One other quality filtered down as well: Fawn Brimhall’s father’s willingness to explore thought, ask questions, and tolerate varied opinion because, said Fawn’s sister, “‘the greatest thing that mother gave us was a need for intellectual honesty’” (Newell G. Bringhurst, “Fawn M. Brodie—Her Biographies as Autobiography,” Pacific Historical Review LIX, #2, May 1990, p. 214). Intellectual honesty was not very compatible with the rigid religious dogma that the McKay side of the family brought to the marriage.

This whispered history probably contributed to Fawn Brimhall’s inferior status within her husband’s extended family. Did she feel cornered? Inferior by sex, inferior by being an in-law, burdened with debt and a husband who would not fight for her, restricted to a few rooms in their “home,” blocked from open discussion of her problems, and under her temple oath to obey her husband, she became a “‘secret heretic,’” a “‘thorough going heretic,’” and, later, Fawn’s secret confidante in her first major—and heretical—writing. She remained a closeted person who could not develop her full self. Her hatred turned against herself and the Mormon doctrine. She was a “‘social Mormon,’” who doubted the Mormon view of eternity and “‘hated the temple ceremony so bad that it was just ghastly.’” She wondered how the secret Mormon temple “‘garments [underwear] could be sacred when they’re worn next to a dirty body.’” Fawn McKay’s older sister, Flora, believed that their mother “‘hated sex’” and defended herself in her home by sleeping in one bed with two daughters while her husband slept in another bed with a son.

When puberty came, Fawn confessed to wanting to “‘feel [her own] vagina.’” Her mother was shocked, responding that she should “‘never touch it. Never touch it!’” Fawn responded with the self-inflicted compulsion of wiggling her big toes to keep away from her “‘privates.’”

Besides these maternal instructions and Fawn’s obedience, do we have any indication of oedipal conflicts? Without further evidence, such ideas require speculation. Might Fawn’s adolescent sexual struggles (and later frigidity, discussed below) have had also to do with sensing her father’s libidinal dissatisfactions and reflect the wishes from many years previously of a small daughter’s wish to comfort her father? A speculation that Fawn resented her older sister Flora, who was not sexually inhibited and had a warm and close relationship with their father, is challenged by the fact that Fawn and Flora were life-long friends, without evidence of resentment.

We should not be surprised that when puberty started, Fawn saw herself as deformed. It took the displaced concern over being too tall—she reached 5’10” and slumped to diminish this aberration. The issue of inequity in the McKay home, especially of male power and privilege, is apparent. But there is another complicating layer in this home, represented by this mother who considers the female genitalia as poisonous and the body dirty. The two seem connected. It appears to me that it is as if the subjugation of women is enhanced because of their genitals. With Fawn, her basic deformity would not be her height, but her genitals, now with menses. The issue for Fawn is not just unfairness, but double unfairness. Had Fawn grown up in a home where there was a mother model pleased with herself, then this second layer would not have occurred. But, how often, especially in this cultural setting, would such a pleased self-view be possible?

Fawn, taller than the boys her age, received the attention of a youth, Dilworth Jensen, five years senior and in college. It was a good relationship, with common interests in books and excelling in school. Fawn “‘adored being with him.’” Despite her age, there was some talk of marriage. Even so, her family resisted because of their elite status and his Scandinavian background. She spent the next two years at the Mormon-owned Weber College and met some students from outside Utah. She took broadening courses, directing herself toward English composition and literature.

Fawn was good at public speaking, and the school sponsored debates on unemployment insurance and questions of free trade. Fawn and a partner represented the school and traveled throughout the Midwest. At the former Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, she had a startling debate with a pastor from a smaller antagonistic sect of Mormons, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ), that had not gone

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west and had presidents from the progeny of Joseph Smith. From him Fawn learned for the first time that Utah Mormons believed Smith had had 27 wives. “‘I was dumbfounded and had to confess absolute ignorance.’” While she was only 15 years old, this was the first instance among many of an increasing awareness that being kept from information is a form of being deceived.

For practical reasons, she attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City from the ages of 17 to 19. “‘I was devout until I went to the University of Utah,’” she once said. “‘There was nothing very spectacular about it…. It was a quiet kind of moving out into … the larger society and learning that the center of the universe was not Salt Lake City as I had been taught as a child.’” The school was bigger than Weber College, and some of the faculty was antagonistic to the Mormon Church, its policies, and its leaders. Although there were relatives in the city, this was the first time Fawn became known for herself and not her family’s Church positions.

Important in her developing her independent thinking was a maternal uncle, Dean R. Brimhall. He and his wife were both well educated and led two separate careers while maintaining a successful marriage. He had a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University. She had degrees from the University of Utah and the University of Southern California, and would become known as “The First Lady of the Utah Theater.” Perhaps most importantly, her uncle assumed his wife’s equality and encouraged her career, a contrast to Fawn’s hometown environment. Her uncle, despite a Mormon background and mission, was a religious skeptic. This knowledge jarred her at first. She initially believed he lacked the strength that could only come from a “‘belief in revealed religion.’” Over time, their relationship grew and he became her closest confidante in the family.

Fawn participated in the debate team, and traveled to California, which had been described as the “fleshpots of Egypt.” Instead she found that Californians could be devout in their varied beliefs, once again challenging her Mormon teachings about other religions. However, she quit debate because of her developing integrity, for she believed the participants would select documents only for the purpose of enhancing their potential win and avoid a balanced view of the need for unemployment insurance—all while there were long bread lines in the midst of the Great Depression.

Courses in ethics and child psychology cast further doubt on her religious beliefs. For the first time she realized that the majority of anthropologists believed that early Native Americans were of Asian origin. She worked in a library, and read broadening—non-believing—books about Mormonism and Joseph Smith. Her shock was at two levels: doubt that such stories about Smith could be true and developing fury at being lied to through the censoring of information.

A cousin-in-law, Alice Smith McKay, wrote a master’s thesis on a few prophecies of Joseph Smith that the Church leaders declared were “beyond the human power to discern or to calculate.” Her cousin realized that at least one prominent “prophecy” concerning the future Civil War had simply come from information commonly available at the time. Her cousin believed that “‘in the absence of [tangible] information,’” Smith could not utter prophecies to his people. She further postulated that his “prophecies” were accepted when Smith’s people were in need of his command for their welfare and desperate for his leadership.

Fawn’s boyfriend, Dilworth Jensen, returned from his Swiss-Austrian mission, and their relationship resumed despite their religious differences “‘that we could not discuss.’” There were renewed plans to marry, and Fawn sought solace from her religious doubt, anxiety, and turmoil in her academic studies. Now we catch a rare glimpse of her inner struggles in her first and only published work of fiction, entitled “Experiment,” written for a literary competition. The story, with similarities to Shaw’s Pygmalion, concerned a doctor who claims the ability to achieve human perfectibility—all by “‘revolutionizing a human subject in terms of appearance, behavior and personality.’” Challenged by a colleague, he insists that he had already raised an “‘utterly commonplace girl,’” who lived in a small rural community known as “Hilltown,” to perfection. Although important to understanding Fawn McKay, the story won no awards, and a critical teacher told her she had no talent for fiction. Her story is a curious contradiction, with female perfection achieved under the control of a man—hardly true equality—and we might wonder what changes had to occur to a woman’s body to make it perfect. The fiction story suggests Fawn’s

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belief in the possibility that perfection can be actually achieved—and is not just a mental construct. We benefit from Fawn McKay Brodie’s drive for perfection in her work, but she suffered and could not relax, and this drive intensified the sexism issue throughout her life. I think that is why she was so driven: happy only when she was working on a book that might become perfect, but never could be, so she had to keep at it.

After graduating from university with high honors in June 1934, Fawn returned to Ogden, Utah, and taught English at Weber College, teaching “rings around” many of the long-established teachers and gaining respect. Her older sister taught grade school, and between them they were able to rent a small house that was big enough to accommodate the whole McKay family in the winter months, providing them with heat and indoor plumbing.

Fawn’s relationship continued with Dilworth Jensen, her devout Mormon, who had returned from his missionary work. He transferred from school to school with better programs in his field of zoology and was awarded a graduate fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. Fawn received a similar fellowship at the same school and once more there was talk of marriage. But her parents encouraged her to attend the University of Chicago because it had a vigorous Mormon youth group; her father knew the president of the school; they were not yet prepared for her to marry; and they wanted her to avoid Berkeley and Dilworth Jensen. Despite fondness for her long-standing boyfriend, Fawn wished to be on her own, and had her own growing doubts about his strong Mormon devotion, especially in view of her declining devotion.

Entering the University of Chicago brought her an “‘enormously exhilarating … sense of liberation … the confining aspects of the Mormon religion dropped off within a few weeks…. It was like taking off a hot coat in the summertime.’” Her leaving Mormonism was a quiet, gradual process, without Sturm und Drang. She participated pleasantly with the local congregation. Meanwhile, her university studies focused on various literary figures, including D. H. Lawrence, on whom she wrote a master’s essay. This process provided her with training in historical methodology, and within a year she had her master’s degree in English literature. She was 20 years old.

During that year, she had an epiphany brought on by an inquisitive roommate. When Fawn explained the “golden plates” of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith’s miraculous translation of them, the woman asked, “‘What happened to these golden plates?’” and Fawn replied, “‘An angel came and took them back to heaven.’” The roommate rolled her eyes, and Fawn, capable at that point of identifying with the roommate’s disbelief, appreciated the absurdity of the story. All that was needed to complete her break from the Mormon faith was support in her expanded doubt and someone with insightful challenging inquiry.

After a six-week whirlwind courtship, Fawn McKay married Bernard Brodie on the same day as her graduation. She had caught his eye when she was waiting on tables in the University cafeteria. His Jewish parents had emigrated from Latvia, and he grew up in tenement housing on the West Side of Chicago. His father provided for the family as an itinerant peddler with a horse-drawn wagon. Bernard was dynamic, passionate, and intelligent, with a driven thirst for knowledge, and was quick to show his feelings and emotions. His language was eloquent, and he had a fondness for lyrical poetry, good music, and beautiful flowers. He recognized Fawn’s classic beauty and intelligence.

The only member from either family who attended the wedding was Fawn’s mother. Out of courtesy to her family, they married in the University of Chicago Latter-day Saint chapel. Earlier, Bernard had broken almost all contact with his family, who strongly disapproved of his marriage to Fawn. Her own family had united in trying to fight off this marriage, with anti-Semitic letters and fasting and prayer; her uncle, future LDS President David O. McKay, traveled to Chicago to try to dissuade her. Her long-standing Mormon boyfriend—they had communicated by almost daily letters—was stunned at her unexpected announcement of her intent to marry and felt she independently changed her personality to suit different environments.

By this time, Fawn had formed her disbelief, centering on the naturalistic facts that Native Americans had Mongolian features and that all evidence proposed their arrival across the Siberian land bridge five to ten thousand years earlier than Book of Mormon peoples, who had supposedly arrived in two pe-

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riods: around 600 BCE from the land of Israel and around 2500 BCE from Mesopotamia to a land where “never man had been” (Book of Mormon, Ether 2:5). Her bitterness at this discovery would provide the energy for her intellectual rebellion.

The Book of Mormon is the prime external source of evidence for the claims of Joseph Smith and continues to be studied in weekly meetings and in the home by all members of the family. Smith claimed that, while producing the Book of Mormon, various angels returned to earth and, by the laying on of hands, restored to earth the authority of God to men. This would make the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the only true Church of God, and its President the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator for the world. Secondly, the “priesthood” has been passed from Smith and partners down through the Mormon Church and all male members are expected to receive its various levels by the laying on of hands throughout life. Each male member has the right to receive revelation (or its minor form, inspiration), certifying his decisions. This priesthood of males also makes them the leaders in the family. Women are subject to their authority and are, by inference and despite argument, inferior. But what if one of the Book of Mormon’s most basic premises—about Native Americans—was not true?

In Brodie’s case, the priesthood included her uncle, Apostle, and later President, David O. McKay, and her father, elevated to be an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in the early 1940s. She was raised in an unusual situation with family members who had the highest authority and, therefore, held strong claim to being “inspired” in their acts and decisions—both within and outside their families. Now she wondered if they were devoting their lives to a fraudulent institution, and, more to the point, were they also lying by covering up or re-writing history? Now she was facing her issue: men, anatomically complete—even “perfect”—were not only not perfect, but seriously flawed.

After her marriage, Fawn Brodie took entry-level jobs and then ended up in a library, which allowed her to begin quiet research. Interested and curious about the Mormon religion, her husband spurred her puzzlement. But some of the same forces driving her into inquiry and heresy were also interfering with the intimacy in their marriage. She was restricted and, perhaps, frigid with Bernard. Her sister advised her to just “‘let go’” in sex. Fawn replied, “‘How can I let go?’” Fawn was raised in a culture of puritanical sex, with pre-marital relations strictly forbidden. Now she was expected to immediately reverse these strictures while shucking off the control and domination of the male world. Could she allow the overwhelming and forbidden explosion at the center of her physical being to occur with the participation of a man? Again, oedipal conflicts remain highly speculative.

She did a researched inquiry of the Church welfare system, entitled “Mormon Security,” and found misrepresentation vis-à-vis government relief programs. She published her study in the Nation under a pseudonym to avoid family embarrassment. She was again disillusioned by the Church’s behavior, which heightened her curiosity about Joseph Smith, and, finding no scholarly biography available, decided to write one. During this period of time, her husband finished his PhD dissertation, they moved three times, and she became a mother to the first of three children.

Brodie had already come to the conclusion “‘that the whole Book of Mormon story was false’” and that Joseph Smith was a “‘conscious fraud.’”

If the Book of Mormon came out of his own background in western New York, which he insisted came from golden plates, then what kind of man was this? The whole problem of his credibility, I thought, was crying out for some explanation … It was a piece of detective work that I found absolutely compelling. It was fantastic! I was gripped by it … and was fascinated the whole time. I was baffled by the complexities of this man and remained somewhat baffled even after the book was finished … [but much later with the psychiatric literature] I felt I had some more explanations…. The fraudulent nature of the Book of Mormon is, I think, unmistakable. (Shirley E. Stephenson, “Biography of Fawn McKay Brodie,” interview, California State University Oral History Program, O.H. 1523, 1975, pp. 7-9, hereafter “Interview”)

She never lost those views. Her son Bruce later said that she “‘felt an intense sense of betrayal but was working through an equally intense childhood love for [Joseph Smith] who had been vitally important [to her]’” (Newell G. Bringhurst, “Fawn M. Brodie—Her Biographies as Autobiography,” Pacific Historical Review 59, May 1990, p. 215). She

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could share her ideas with her maternal uncle, Dean Brimhall, who had become a non-believer as well, and wrote him that through her perusal of early 19^th century newspapers that Smith would have read—“‘an absolute goldmine’”—she was “‘able to trace almost every idea in [the Book of Mormon] right down to Ontario Co. New York 1827 [including] the lost tribe theory, the exterminated race theory, anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism—the whole gamut of sectarian religious controversy’” (“Interview,” p. 5; Biography, p. 72).

In addition to her uncle, two other people were critically important to her and enhanced her book greatly. The most important was her husband. She later said,

The volume would have been a harsher indictment of Joseph Smith had it not be for [Bernard’s] influence. I was angered by the obvious nature of the fraud in his writing of the Book of Mormon…. My husband kept urging me to look at the man’s genius, to explain his successes, and to make sure that the reader understood why so many people loved him, and believed in him. If there is real compassion for Joseph Smith in the book, and I believe there is, it is more the result of the influence of my husband than anyone else. (Newell G. Bringhurst, “Fawn Brodie and her Quest for Independence,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 22:2, Summer 1989, p. 89)

The second was Dale Morgan, a non-believing Mormon historian of note who became her mentor, careful critic, and personal friend until his untimely death in 1971 at age 56. He also modified her writing, telling her,

Your own point of view … is much too hard and fast, to my way of thinking, it is too coldly logical in its conception of Joseph’s mind and the development of his character. Your view of him is all hard edges, without any of those blurrings which are more difficult to cope with but which constitute a man in the round. I am particularly struck with the assumption your MS. makes that Joseph was a self-conscious imposter.

Morgan’s perceptive view of Joseph Smith almost suggests he knew Object Relations theory: “Regardless of how he got started with the Mormon affair, he came to believe absolutely in what he was doing; his sincerity can hardly be challenged. I think he had an extreme capacity for fantasy, and ultimately the fantasy may have become more real to him than reality itself, to the point that it displaced reality.” How did this happen?

The responsibility [of his followers] in the mak[ing] of their prophet, in the proliferation of his legend, is not to be dismissed. Their hunger for miracle, their thirst for the marvelous, their lust for assurance that they were God’s chosen people, to be preserved on the great and terrible day, made them hardly less than Joseph, the authors of his history. His questionable responsibility is the faithful image of their own. (John Phillip Walker, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History, 1986, p. 260)

As Brodie moved forward in her research, she wanted to examine a little known 1832 diary of Joseph Smith in the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City. (She also asked about records on polygamy.) Perhaps she hoped that, if allowed to examine this particular diary, she would be allowed other searches. However, she was confronted by her uncle, David O. McKay; the discussion was acrimonious; and she was forbidden to see the diary or use the archives. Although, the next day she received a note from him authorizing her access to the archives, she knew now she could not use her family connection and she never did. The whole incident suggested to her that the hierarchy was involved in a cover-up of information.

Where were Brodie’s parents in all of this? Early in her research for No Man, she started sharing her ideas with her mother, who had become “‘a thoroughgoing heretic.’” It was “‘almost as much fun to discuss the Church with her’” as with her uncle, Dean Brimhall. But her father remained emotionally and intellectually unavailable. In previous discussions, he had replied, “‘You’ve got to believe.’” Now he refused to discuss the book with his daughter or even acknowledge its existence. Later she said,

My father never did read the Joseph Smith biography … I always felt … that his not reading it was an act of real hostility … and his refusal to discuss it hurt me more, I think, than an angry argument about the contents would have done. …we both found it impossible to communicate on the subject, as on most others.

If there was oedipal conflict in Brodie’s makeup, this is perhaps the strongest evidence for such speculation. Some of her fury in her life might

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have been a result of the emotional barrier—rejection—from her father.

Then, as the book was in its final stages, her father suffered a heart attack. Had her work contributed to this threat to his life? “‘The consequences for my own peace of mind would be simply unbearable,’” she said, adding, “‘If I didn’t have such an affection for my father, who is the soul of kindness, perhaps I wouldn’t be so troubled.’” These are unilateral conscious thoughts, and her ambivalence toward her father is hidden. Her father slowly recovered, but then she identified with his potential death and her guilt led to a fear that she might be killed in some kind of accident. She and her father continued to act as if the book did not exist, and she feared that the unpleasantness the book would create for her father. Now the denial: “‘I suspect some Freudian would explain my whole five-year toil on the basis of an unconscious desire to wound him.… God knows the compulsion I have been laboring under has been emotional rather than intellectual, but it doesn’t have its roots in that kind of complex.’”

Well, yes, it does. At various layers, she was intent on destroying the fraud and corruption of Joseph Smith, including his abuse of women; she also was intent on exposing the cover-up and manipulation of history by the Mormon male hierarchy that continued to support Smith; and she was attacking her father who was part of that system, and who, within their home, had taken a submissive role to his McKay background, and left his wife and family in disadvantage.

Brodie’s was an attack on sexism and inequity sustained by religious dishonesty. These are social issues, but then we are left with a deeper, unanswerable question as to how she felt about being a woman. Eleven months before the book was published, she suffered a miscarriage. “‘I had all the pain and misery of childbirth without anything to show for it.’” The physical inequity of men and women in reproduction is not social, but natural. She had every right to be furious at the social inequity, but if she was furious with the natural dissonance that leaves men relatively unencumbered, she would have been in warfare with her own being, and she was envious of men. Somehow, the work on the book had contained and balanced this struggle, but now she desired the continuity that men had in work. “‘Once you have raised a child to the ripe age of three and sent him off to nursery school there isn’t anything else to turn [to] except to having another—which is of course satisfying enough in itself, but only for another three or four years. Then where are you?’” She reached the “‘dreadful day for a woman’”—her 30^th birthday—three months before the book was published.

Three years later she was struggling with “‘inertia.’” “‘If one wanted to discover the laws of inertia the best place to go for data [is] the female mind…. So many fathers pass their genius on to their daughters, but as a general rule the talents lie dormant and are passed on to flower in the sons.’” A woman fails to live up to her intellectual potential because of the “‘extraordinary satisfaction a woman gets from taking care of small children. It makes ambition seem ridiculous, and shows up fame for the hollow thing it is.’” Then the children grow up, and a woman’s life is “‘unutterably barren, and [it’s] too late to fill it up with anything.’”

This first conundrum asks if, besides the sexism in her rearing, she had an inherent drive antagonistic to her gender, with intellectual ambition incompatible with motherhood. Even at that late date, American society, most especially Mormon subculture, had trouble reconciling motherhood and professional occupation. Or did the drive also come from her environment in her first year or two, and leave a residual of an impossible demand for perfection—associated with maleness—in her work. Was she never able to relax and enjoy a casual life, partly because she could never attain equality and completeness—no matter how excellent her work?

When the book was published, Brodie became a national figure. She received praise and condemnation “‘in about equal amounts’” and mostly along religious lines. Within six months she was excommunicated by the Mormon Church, which brought tears, mostly, she emphasized, because of the effect on her parents and, we might also suspect, as public and private rationalization for how hurt she was. The book is a marvel to read, at times like a historical criminal investigation; at times with the grace of a flowing stream; at times with energy that simply propels one forward.

There was another reason the book made such waves. What the Mormons couldn’t believe was Brodie’s documentation. Up to that time, the

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studies of Joseph Smith, by outsiders, were condemning and scurrilous; by insiders, they were apologetic Sunday school manuals. Yet she had a view of Smith that allowed her to perceptively evaluate the materials that she found that no one else even suspected existed. For example, in an obscure outdated religious encyclopedia, she found a report of a trial of Smith, taken from a courtroom docket book and dated four years before the Book of Mormon. This report had him found guilty of “‘disorderly conduct’” and described his fraudulent behavior in simple magic trickery, deceit, and money-digging rituals. But the original source of the report had disappeared. Nevertheless, the report fit her view of Smith, and with courage she included it in her biography. As expected, devout historians accused her of creating history by using forged documents. But she had accurately measured her man: shortly after her book was published, she found another lengthy written report of this trial, and eventually three other confirmations surfaced—including an original holograph—which supported her view (No Man, 16, pp. 427-428, 440-441; Biography, pp. 121, 291n16).

Many of the Mormon devout have objected to Brodie’s “psychologizing” that imposed ideas into Joseph Smith’s mind. We now know that her list of wives for Joseph Smith was flawed by her ill view of the man, as we can firmly document only 33 wives, including 14-year-old girls and already married women. Some have suggested that her “fictional” writing style undermined the historical aspects of the book or that she was extreme in her view of Smith and did not explore the “broad middle ground” between fraud and prophet. Some devout historians vigorously object to any study of Smith that refuses to consider the believed valid “supernatural” elements in his life. Other, more kindly, reviews suggest it is time to move on to other issues in Mormon history.

Nonetheless, Brodie’s work, directly or indirectly, helped modify Mormonism. She embarrassed every devout Mormon historian and forced Mormon studies to a higher plane. She contributed to the muting of racism that now allows black men to hold the priesthood. The secret temple ceremonies have mellowed with the changing of the oath for wives from obedience to “following their husbands as their husbands follow the Lord.” Over the last 50 years, the importance of Joseph Smith has diminished in comparison with the emphasis on Jesus and the New Testament. Many now believe that Smith’s “translation” of the gold plates ran through his thinking and emotions, thus corrupting the translation with 19^th-century American influences. These changes allow for a fudging of absolute belief in Smith as Prophet. I think Brodie would have been pleased with the slow modifications and compromises that are being made concerning Smith, but I don’t think she would have smiled. She would have viewed these adjustments as continued deceit, avoiding looking at leaders who value power more than truth, or avoiding the painful self-exploration that challenges the continued belief in improbabilities that science has turned into impossibilities.

Brodie refused to return to the “‘swamp’” of Mormon history and do a full re-write on Joseph Smith when her book was republished 26 years later in 1971, but she added an updated supplement. She commented that she had earlier missed the “fratricide” that exists throughout the Book of Mormon, and that she had not had the training to delve into Smith’s identity problems. I like to think that, as some concepts crystallized in psychoanalysis, she would have recognized the destructive results of childhood leg surgery trauma in the adult Joseph Smith, which pervades the Book of Mormon, and that she would have actively used the concepts of narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, and malignant narcissism in understanding his identity problems.

Here is my personal and speculative brief summary of Joseph Smith’s identity. He was raised in poverty and in a dysfunctional, unstable, and probably alcoholic family. He underwent a terrible childhood illness and a horrible traumatic leg surgery, which resulted in regressive rage that led to identity diffusion. This was followed by a false superimposed self with magical, then prophetic, powers, which was encouraged by his family. All this led to an imagination of fury and destructiveness which combined rage with versions of his surgery in a book of terror, hatred, and destruction: the Book of Mormon. His goal with his book and supernatural claims was to avoid any touch of helplessness by gaining power and control over others. His belief in his false self solidified with the convictions of his followers, and he became whom they wanted him to convince them that he was. He maneuvered both men and women, demanding all of their time, talent, and pos-

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sessions—including, on occasion, their wives. When they were offered, Smith would be reassured briefly. (Robert D. Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith, 1999, passim).

Brodie saw Smith’s polygamy as “‘disguised whoredoms’” and partly a result of his hypersexuality. A broader and deeper question is whether he was capable of loving himself or anyone else.

The work on her book was done, and Brodie wondered whom she would write about next. One possibility after another was tossed aside. No woman met her criteria. Most wives of US presidents were boring, and her first choice, Eleanor Roosevelt, was being done by others. But which man? “‘Why is it, I wonder, that I prefer someone I can tear into? Is it because until I was twenty I was such a supremely good and obedient child that I am still trying to make up for lost time?’” If she was in warfare with her physical being, then some of her attack on the men in her histories was probably projection and envy. The two issues—nature’s physical bias and social inequity—came together four and a half years later in another frightening miscarriage that required hospitalization as she came close to death. Some of the McKay family had indicated that the loss of the child and the near-fatal illness were “‘just punishment’” for her “‘sins.’” She responded with a depression that took the form of “‘pessimism & bitterness…. If all the venom that accumulated in my soul could have been harnessed in some kind of explosive [the whole] state [of Utah] would simply have been blown to nothing.’” Then the struggle between writing and motherhood tipped the other way with her plans to have another baby. “‘This is priority number one, and everything else is going to be sacrificed to it.’”

It was becoming clear that writing about Joseph Smith had not fully exorcised Brodie’s demons about male control and duplicity. Her father had had a second, serious heart attack four years after the book on Joseph Smith had been published. His health declined, and five years later he developed inoperable cancer of the neck. He became an enfeebled and blind invalid, but refused care from home-health care workers, and her mother was deteriorating from the burden of caring for him. Brodie was in the midst of her own psychoanalysis when her mother attempted suicide, appeared to improve, and then made another suicide attempt. She could not communicate well with her mother’s psychiatrist, who used shock treatment but little personal intervention. Brodie found another therapist for her mother, but the depression was severe.

Brodie blamed her father for her mother’s condition because of all his demands on her. “‘My disillusionment with my Father reached the lowest possible point … absolute bottom,’” she wrote to her uncle Dean Brimhall.

Maybe in years to come I can be more forgiving, but he makes any kind of detachment so difficult because of continuing pretensions to purity and saintliness. And of course I started out as a child thinking he was next to God in gallantry and goodness. Then, too, there is the factor that I have hurt him, and having hurt him I must believe the worst about him lest I suffer too much from guilt myself.

She could list many factors for her mother’s depression, and one she imagined was an intolerable secret desire to have her husband dead—and, again, we must wonder about projection. Her mother improved in dramatic fashion with shock treatment, but her father continued to deteriorate, and died two years later at the age of 82. Two years after that, her mother succeeded in suicide by setting herself on fire, suffering in critical condition for several days before dying at the age of 71.

During the years of the 1950s and 1960s, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, advanced in recognition for his writing on national military strategies; she co-authored From Crossbow to H-Bomb (1962) with him. His work required repeated relocations (Dartmouth College, Yale, the Pentagon, and the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica) but they eventually settled in Pacific Palisades in California. They raised three children successfully. Although her only degree was a master’s in English, she achieved tenure as a professor of history at UCLA, but not without a bitter fight that contained some sexism and rigidity against those without PhDs in their chosen field and opposition from some who felt there was little place for psychological interpretation in history. She was a liberal Democrat, an environmentalist, and a quiet feminist who knew she was underpaid compared to her husband. Through her husband’s work, they were acquaintances with the politically prominent such as Henry Kissinger, and through her own work, she began associations with the psychoanalytic institutes in Los Angeles. Her works became increase-

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ingly psychological. She had entered a two-and-a-half-year psychoanalysis when she was 40 years old. In an interview 20 years later, she was effusive about the application of psychoanalytic thought in biography. She described such attempts as “‘treacherous’” but, when done well, very rewarding (“Interview,” pp. 18-21).

Each of Brodie’s last four biographies was a variation of her work on Joseph Smith. There was a focus on a powerful man, his sexual life, and deception and cover-up. She was initially interested in Thaddeus Stevens because of the racial issues with blacks and as a continuation of the Mormon ban on blacks in the priesthood. She believed she would be dealing with a scoundrel similar to Smith, but

the more I read about Stevens, the more I felt he had been abused and vilified, that this man really had elements of greatness. So, in a way it was the reverse of Joseph Smith. Here, I was rebuilding a reputation that had been abused. With Joseph Smith, I felt this man whom I had been brought up to respect as a deity did not deserve that reputation. It was a total about face in terms of intention. It was good to be doing a positive thing rather than the destructive thing, because I had always felt guilty about the destructive nature of the Joseph Smith book (“Interview,” pp. 14-15).

She investigated Stevens’ childhood, and wondered, “‘what would [his clubfoot] do to a man’s psyche?’” and probed his “‘extraordinary capacity for hatred,’” but still corrected the view of him as a “‘malignant and vindictive old man.’” Her book, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959), was commercially unsuccessful but altered the view of Southern Reconstruction (Biography, 116-154 passim; Bringhurst, “Fawn M. Brodie—Her Biographies as Autobiography,” pp. 222-223).

Brodie was soon invited to write an introduction to a new edition of The City of the Saints (1861) by the explorer, eccentric scholar, linguist, and sexologist of the 19th century, Sir Richard Francis Burton. This one of his 40 books dealt with Salt Lake City and polygamy. She became “‘lost to this man, who was fascinating beyond belief.… [It was] a fun book to write and to research.’” She identified with his driven compulsivity and was fascinated by his sampling of “‘everything in the sexual market’” in the countries he visited. The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton was published in 1967. Conflict in Burton’s life existed mostly between him and his devout Roman Catholic wife, who loved him, yet was repelled by his interest in sex. She provided the deception and cover-up when she burned his 40-year collection of manuscripts and diaries, and then wrote a sanitized biography of him (“Interview,” p. 16-17; Biography, pp. 155-184 passim).

By the time she was 50 in 1965, Brodie had achieved national recognition as an author and biographer. Her earlier works were republished; she had articles published in distinguished journals and magazines; and the Utah State Historical Society gave her its most prestigious honor by making her a Fellow.

Brodie reached her apogee of writing ability combined with psychological insight during her seven years of work on the 600-page Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), earning her broad-based acclaim, stunning publication numbers, and a degree of financial wealth. It was a Book of the Month Club selection and on The New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks. She clearly loved this man and his genius, and was ready to delve into his conflicts. She had dreams of being married to him and told her son, “‘If I had been a man, I would have been a man like [Jefferson].’” She introduced the world to Sally Hemings, his African-American slave, mistress of 28 years, and mother of seven of his children. The denial and hiding by his descendents and admirers replicated her experience with Joseph Smith and the Mormon devout. Once again, she was that “‘horrible Brodie woman.’” Fawn acknowledged,

and here [with Jefferson] we have a deity as important to many Americans as Joseph Smith is to many Mormons.… [But] I am prepared for incomprehension as well as controversy. I am prepared for distortion and am prepared for indignation. But I still think the time is ripe for what I have written, and that in general the response will be favorable, and good. It may even be overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

Brodie was correct, for she was writing in the midst of the civil rights movement. She publicly debated Gary Wills, who said Sally Hemings was only a “‘healthy prostitute’” instead of a real love involvement. She helped us understand Jefferson’s inaction on slavery that affects us even today. As Brodie’s biographer, Newell G. Bringhurst, summarized:

If he freed his slaves in conformity with his self-proclaimed ideals of liberty and equal-

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ity, they would have been banished from the state as freedmen in accordance with Virginia law. Thus, the only way Jefferson could maintain his relationship with Sally Hemings was to keep her enslaved. This made the larger issue of slavery too complex to deal with. And so Jefferson drifted along apathetically through the remainder of his life, leaving it to later generations of Americans to contend with the slavery issue.

Once again, as with Smith, she was vindicated, this time by DNA studies, but not until many years after her death.

During the time Brodie was writing about Jefferson’s secret life, she discovered that her husband had become deeply involved in a secret affair with another woman. With Fawn Brodie’s lifelong preoccupation and fury about the sexual immorality and deceit of men, it is hard to imagine anything that would have been more painful for her. She was mortified, thought of divorce, but felt the marriage had had so many positive aspects through their long relationship that it survived.

Let us pause here for a speck of contemplation. While placing full responsibility for her husband’s dishonesty and deceit on his shoulders, we might wonder if, in some way, her sexual struggles unconsciously set up the framework for his behavior. Did he feel her force and drive as a competition that threatened his masculinity? She was ascending in accomplishment and recognition, while his own career had leveled, perhaps even faltered. He had been jealous of his wife’s involvement with Jefferson, whether or not he knew of her dreams of being married to him. “God, I’m glad that man is out of the house,” he reportedly said as the book was finished. Is Bernard’s infidelity and his wish for his wife to behave submissively (as I seek to establish below), both suggesting threatened masculinity, tied to another puzzle in her life concerning her focus on racism and sexism in the subjects of her biographies? In at least three of her books she attacked racism, and it is possible that she, along with other critics, provided pressure for the 1978 “revelation” to the Mormon Prophet allowing black men to hold the priesthood.

It isn’t that Brodie didn’t attack sexism, but this was the issue in her personal history, yet it seemed to get the short end of the stick in her scholarship. When asked her attitude towards feminism in the 1975 interview, she acknowledged her quiet feminism and irritation at the pay discrepancy compared to her husband, but then she added,

I don’t pay very much attention to [the feminists]; really, a lot of them are shrews. I guess I am terribly old-fashioned in that respect. I agree with my husband when he quotes, I guess it’s King Lear, “Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman.” And yet, I can’t help but admire what they are doing. I believe that women have been abused and are still being abused…. It is just that … I work alone (“Interview,” p. 47).

So, besides being unfaithful, her generally supportive husband wasn’t supportive in an important area. Even with a distinguished, moderate, thoughtful author, there is a place, on occasion, for “I am woman. Hear me roar!” Her whole life would have justified an outburst. Did she emphasize her “feminine” side as reaction formation to her wish for masculinity? In Brodie’s background, anatomical masculinity was conflated with equality and privilege and led to insolvable conflict. (While she had unending unconscious conflict about it, had she had the magical choice to become a man, I don’t think she would have taken it.)

By the mid-1970s, Brodie was becoming more and more alone with her writing. Her closest mentors and friends, Dale Morgan and maternal uncle, Dean Brimhall, had died. Her relationship with her husband was strained—it was “‘not an easy marriage’”; they bickered in front of family and friends; he complained about her cooking and could be crotchety, and continued to be flirtatious.

In the midst of this, Brodie began her last book, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (1981). She despised Nixon. Her private comments included statements that he was “‘a plain damn liar,’” “‘a rattlesnake,’” and “‘a total obscenity.’” It became personal, for she believed that Nixon had authorized the break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Louis Fielding, who had been Brodie’s analyst as well. Nixon reminded her of Joseph Smith, but Nixon’s imposture lacked charm. She tried to find evidence of homosexuality in Nixon, even if only of “‘latent’” homosexuality.

In the midst of this, Bernard developed cancer, underwent treatment, improved, faltered, deteriorated, and died a year later, in November 1978. Her

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bitterness and deep love for her husband turned her grief to depression from which she never recovered. She missed him terribly, felt helpless in her work, and dreamed of walking and eating with him.

Brodie continued to work on Nixon, but we must wonder how much of the intensity of her hatred towards him was a displacement and/or expression of the underside of her ambivalent fury stirred by her husband’s infidelity, layered on top of Joseph Smith and her equally ambivalent feelings toward her father, paternal uncle David O. McKay, and many others. Was the search for Nixon’s homosexuality partly a result of her own unresolved urge to masculinity? Her work on Nixon would be criticized for being too speculative and for the hostility for her subject that showed through her work.

Now, toward the end of her life, Brodie wondered why “‘I keep driving myself, a compulsive woman racing around frantically, tracking down trivia to build a biographical mosaic. Why do I do it? Because I am unhappy when I’m not doing it.’” Perhaps we can make sense out of it. All of her books were about so-called “perfect” men who, instead, were flawed. What about her own flawed, anatomically incomplete self? She could compensate for that as long as she was accomplishing excellence—“perfection”—in her work.

In September 1980, Brodie was diagnosed with cancer. Her various treatments exhausted her, and she raced to finish the Nixon volume before she died. She sent off the last revision, and the book was published eight months after her death on January 10, 1981. Her daughter, Pamela, recalled, “‘I never knew her to be so relaxed as she was when she was dying’,” and later added that it wasn’t “‘until she … lay dying that she learned to … value life for the living, instead of for the working.’” By then, it was “‘rather late.’” Her son Bruce, a clinical psychologist, reflected that somewhere deep in his mother’s psyche was the feeling that she “‘should have been a man.’”

There are elements of autobiography in all of Brodie’s five books, but the most revealing is the one on Joseph Smith. Fawn Brodie compared her childhood family background with the childhood home of Smith. He came from a family that engaged in magic incantations, divining rods, mystical seer stones, animal sacrifices and digging in the ground for buried treasures—actions and beliefs that required deception of self and others, and reached down to primitive ritualization—the antithesis of rationality. The main similarity between Smith and Brodie was rage, but from different levels of development, intensity, expression, and consequences. Smith’s rage came from all stages of childhood development and was a result of his dysfunctional family, childhood illness, and leg surgery when he was about six or seven years old. These elements reappear in the Book of Mormon and include the destruction of two civilizations. The intensity of his rage can be measured by his documented deceit and manipulation to gain control of every one of his followers out of his aversion to helplessness. Smith’s rage led to violent confrontations for his Church for many decades after his death.

In contrast, Brodie came from a family whose mother (and, later, maternal uncle, Dean R. Brimhall) emphasized intellectual honesty. Her conflicts came from a later stage of development than Smith’s, and her bitterness was selective and limited: directed at her father and her father’s institution of deceitful men in power that blocked or altered information, and at the results of this misinformation that led to financial strain and gross inequity in her home. This discrimination included selective superiority of one family over another (partly the result of Church hierarchy) and especially of men over women, strong enough to leave her with sexual identity conflicts. Whereas Smith’s fury resulted in the use of fantastic fantasy claims to impose his will on, and control over, others, Brodie’s compensation for her feminine “incompleteness” was her work of excellence. Her fury gave her drive to uncover historical truth that might have an influence on others—by making them aware of deceit and abuse of power, partly by highlighting the contradictions in men between their statements and their acts. Instead of playing on the fears and desperations of everyman, she offered a painful evaluation of reality without compensation, suggesting the ultimate in rationality and the highest respect for the individuality and abilities of others.

[Author’s Grateful Acknowledgement: The biographer of Fawn McKay Brodie is Newell G. Bringhurst, Instructor of History and Political Science at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, California. Dr. Bringhurst has written extensively on Mormon history and has served as president of the Mormon History Association. He graciously supplied me with a number of papers pertaining to Fawn Brodie, and spent a number of hours in direct discussion about my summarizing her life, mostly from his biography, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life (1999), and his edited anthology of seven articles reviewing different aspects of her first book from different scholars, Reconsidering No Man Knows My History: Fawn M. Brodie and Joseph Smith in Retrospect (1996). While Dr. Bringhurst’s biography is comprehensive, perceptive, sensitive, and fluidly written, I am responsible for the psychological interpretations in this summary.]

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